A Brief History of Male Nudes in America (18 page)

When they gather in the living room for the lighting ceremony, Netta has a surprise: she has managed to drag Franklin into a chair and prop him up with pillows. Most of his body is still uncooperative and any similarity he has to a man sitting in a chair is coincidental, but Netta doesn't care. She thinks that from where they have been it's a step forward.

Carlene has to bite her lip when she sees him. She decides not to interrupt Ham's program, but as soon as it is through, she intends to march Netta out to the kitchen and shake her out of the tree she's been living in all these months.

Ham turns off the overhead light. He feels his way back along the wall, bends and plugs in the tree. His work has paid off. The spruce looks larger, its boughs suddenly thick. The chilis hang in red, open-heart clusters and there, on the tree, become the essence of Christmas itself. The hundreds of tiny white lights pulse and glitter and shoot through the room.

For minutes, all of them are still and transfixed, caught in their private hopes and remembrances as they stare at the small, brilliant tree. Slowly, Carlene looks around and then Netta, and they see the old man with the white light from the tree shining right through him—his big head as clear as an aquarium, his eyes blinking as if on a timer. Drake gets up from the rug where he's been lying and barks twice at Franklin, not sure what he's looking at.

All at once Netta has to sit down—her legs are shaking, her chest heaving, and her first thought is, she hopes Carlene is happy. There's Franklin, empty and transparent as a bread wrapper, sitting up in his living room six days before Christmas. Just half a man, Netta knows, which, of course, is no man at all.

Carlene stands there and pulls her sweater tighter and tighter around her. She can see that the window has worked, that her father has been gone for at least weeks, maybe months, but that Netta has won her claim, too. Like a salty rind, Franklin's body has stayed to find its way through Valentine's and Easter and beyond to who knows when.

Ham messes with the top of the Christmas tree and rearranges a couple of lights. He turns to Netta and Carlene and wants to know who'll put on the star.

I
don't know where I am—on the porch, at the screen door, standing on the backyard walkway—but I know that I'm there when Daddy and Uncle Gill find RayAnn's fingers in the grass. Where I am standing seems less important than the way the flashlight steals the grass from the night, studies it slowly, then names it green. Daddy holds the light and Uncle Gill bends from a lifetime of factory work into the grass for his daughter's fingers—RayAnn who has cried all the way to the hospital, her hand wrapped in what was a clean bath towel. I'd call her a big, fat crybaby, but I'm half-sick myself, wherever I am—porch, screen door—the half-grown daughter of another factory worker, the one who holds the flashlight and yells at me to get back into the house. “Mind your own business,” he says. “Go watch the kids.”

I think my cousin's fingers are my business. I think my cousin's fingers, strangely enough, are the proper study of this night. She didn't even realize they were gone until her brother started screaming. She
had run past the metal storage shed, and on the torn corner where Uncle Gill had accidentally backed the Buick too fast two winters ago, she had caught her hand, the metal sharp and cold and always just beyond Gill's fixing. That's constantly the way it was—more to get done than there were hours in the day: the storage shed, the roof, the upstairs window. In the garden nearby, potatoes swelled, then rotted in the ground.

And then so fast that even a moment seems too long an explanation, RayAnn's fingers were gone and she was running past the tree, beyond the gladiolus to the rock driveway. Slender and turning dark as peach pits, two fingers lay in the cool, thick grass. Cory screamed with every ounce of breath in him and pointed, not at the driveway as we first believed, but at the setback in our lives that night: RayAnn's hand in its new shape.

Before pain or shock or understanding, before RayAnn's shorts streak completely red, I know where I am. Barefoot and half-grown at Uncle Gill's birthday and these are the two families of factory workers in a summer yard and when we sing we are thieves and castaways. Our rendition of “Happy Birthday” is the one where everyone draws the last word out, fighting against breath, letting the trick candles have their time to pop and spark. Gill closes his eyes when he makes a wish. That deep, that strong. One layer of chocolate and one layer of white to please everybody, my Aunt Jen says, and we are pleased, cake in our hands, a wish, the box fan whirring in a kitchen window.

My uncle is not even forty the night he finds his daughter's fingers in the grass after we have sung to him with the voices of country radio where all the songs are sad or humbled or on the very verge of drifting. Daddy takes the flashlight down off a pantry shelf, and Gill kneels near the shed out of necessity, and the light falls between them, cold and pale as dishwater. The doctor has sent them back here to work the grass, to hold the light, to grow old, and to be sung to. I have been born to watch the kids, though instead I am watching two men from some place beyond my memory, beyond the rock driveway.
The TV is on in the background and in front of me is a moment that cannot be relieved by time or surgery. Gill takes his handkerchief and wraps the fingers like small mementos which he and Daddy will drive through twenty miles of a summer night to deliver.

My business takes me out there—porch, screen door, walkway—to watch what happens after a party when the men are given the odious task of picking up. They search the grass quietly because they know how to get a job done, having been trained at J & B Manufacturing. Gill is in Quality Control and Daddy operates a lathe, and together in the yard their figures speak of labor that takes ten years off their lives. Inside the house their kids eat ice cream from paper cups and watch TV.

My uncle's handkerchief could be the center of this night, and the grass, the bare feet, the cake, the wish, the kids' voices doubling and tripling into a choir, even summer as it is threaded through the box fan in the kitchen window, are all periphery.

“Go watch the kids,” Daddy says. He doesn't return the flashlight to the shelf, and when he backs the car from the driveway, my uncle holding the only darkening gift that will matter in his life, our dusty world is caught in headlights: two seconds of a house, a flash of tree, the tremor of pink gladiolus.

I'm left with the kids. I'm left tall for my age, a gunnysack figure and the disposition of a handful of weeds.
Pretty
is not a word that I think of here. I don't know the word for being young and tall and in the dark, half-woman, half-sick.

Left with me in charge, the younger kids drag the party on, unwilling to let the night go, reluctant to believe that anything has an end. They finish the ice cream and throw their cups out the window. They box each other, run the stairs for fun, appoint a temporary king, gather sheets right off the beds to make a tent. I consider using brute force. I consider RayAnn crying the twenty miles of a summer night, Mama and Aunt Jen in the back seat clutching their purses. What more can they do?

Certainly, I am not the center of this night that has started with a party and ended with a ruined towel. Looking at the blue-black sky, it seems it's nobody's birthday, though we have sung earlier, we have howled while the candles burned their broken flames. Thus the night is doubled, tripled, more voices than bodies, the sky more blue than black.

When I close my eyes, it is not to make a wish, but to forget the cups thrown from the window onto the lawn. The paper cups are not the center of this night, though for a moment they threaten to be. The summer yard—that deep, that strong—is its own character in this story where my cousin's second and third fingers have been lost quick and clean and she stands without pain at the driveway. Everyone else who ever matters is standing there, too: Mama in a dress two sizes too big; Daddy like a dark, stormy block of wood; my sisters who will end up making the prettiest brides and my brother already with his dreams of big money.

Losses and small parties—all of this happens in the two seconds of my growing up. On the porch or at the screen door, I am standing half-woman in the dark. Standing all-woman in the dark is not much different.

R
ocky Davis is all hands and eyes. Big hands—state of Texas hands. Shoulders broad enough to suggest his first good sport coat. He is already wearing size 10 men's shoes, and since last Thursday, Rocky has been on fire. It started as a hot, hopeless weight in his chest and then suddenly blew wide open, his hair smoldering, his arms and face so flushed that twice his father, Wade, gently reaches over to him, puts a cool square hand on his son's shoulder, and tells Rocky to go shower.

“Christ, the kid just can't stand this heat,” Wade says, shaking his head. Rocky is his best son, his only son, the big sleepy kid who doesn't look a thing like him.

It is late August in Tucson and each day the temperature slowly bulldozes upward to 107 or 108. Everywhere in the city, people have lost their patience for summer, for the flies littering windowsills like shiny black tacks, for the steaming sidewalks, and the small patchy Bermuda lawns turned brown, the gardenia and palm leaves limp as
day-old sandwich makings. Some of the small restaurants have even closed for the month and put signs in their windows:
Too hot to cook
.

Rocky just stands there a few moments, as if his father's words take that long to unspiral and plant themselves. Finally, he heads for the shower, taking his time, dragging those Texas hands of his along the dresser until they encounter his father's credit card there. One flick of his wrist and the shiny red plastic is gone.

Rocky doesn't like being told what to do. He'd rather choose. He'd rather live in a free universe, he says.

“Rocko, my boy,” his father tells him, “this is about as free as it gets.”

Wade resumes eating his Baby Ruth, which is breakfast that morning. Three fingers on his right hand wear the delicate brown signature of chocolate, until he licks them and begins to look for the opened sack of Cheetos which he knows is somewhere nearby, and probably under some clothes there's a minibag of Oreos. Usually Rocky and his father don't eat like this, but they're on vacation and whatever rules composed their former life in Denver have been erased.

In the big white tiled bathroom of the El Conquistador Hotel where they are staying, under a stinging spray of water, Rocky stands still and counts to three hundred, which is longer than he has ever stayed in a shower before. It's dangerous in there, he thinks—a bad place to be in an earthquake, the plumbing folding permanently up around him like a tiled coffin.

Steam billows around him and the plastic shower curtain rustles in a warm synthetic breeze. He crosses his arms and buries his hands in the smooth, slick pockets of his armpits. He tucks his head and lets the water pour down over him—a rain, a flood taking off his first skin and leaving him the raw thirteen-year-old that he is: long thin legs interrupted by knees the size of salad plates and, recently, tufts of dark jungled hair down there.

He knows beyond a doubt, there in the shower with his hands safely put away, that he loves her: Ellen Castillo—his father's girlfriend—the woman in the adjoining hotel room who has touring maps of
Tucson spread around her, blue X's marking the sites that they will probably visit: the air museum, the desert zoo, the mission. A tortilla factory. A designer underwear outlet.

Rocky doesn't care where they go as long as it's with her. Africa. Iceland. He and his father were backpacking in the rainy mountains of Tennessee two years ago and he thinks he could probably even stand that again, if she were there, despite the grenade-sized mosquitoes and the sloppy one-pot meals cooked over a campfire.

In a few minutes, his father is there knocking on the bathroom door, telling him that they're waiting. “Hey, buddy, let's get going,” he says.

Wade Davis's voice dulls as it passes through the door and into the steam where Rocky, now standing with a soft white towel around him, hears only a low frequency disturbance—a bug, a bee, something mildly whining out there on the landscape of the tan carpet. He reaches for his T-shirt and shorts and smells them before he dresses: wind, fading fabric softener, and the steely edge of that morning's earlier sweat—the second since he has awakened.

Last year in August on their annual vacation they had flown to Seattle where he didn't sweat at all, he and his father and Eve Resnick—the woman back then, someone who had insisted on high heels, though she couldn't walk in them. She teetered down Pike Street. Packed into Spandex pedal pushers, she wobbled up the long sidewalk leading to the Space Needle. Rocky looked the other way or tried to make it seem he was with another family. He crowded up behind two dark beanpole brothers, hoping to make it look like three. Down on the wooden wharf, as a rusted tugboat pulled up to dock, Eve had finally caught a heel and fallen, and for the rest of the trip she wore scabbed-over knees and consoled herself with tall gin and tonics. Mai tais. Red table wine.

Rocky notices that Ellen Castillo wears blue tennis shoes or sandals with lots of tiny straps across the toes. On the first day of their vacation, which was last Thursday, at a Denny's where they were eating
lunch, Rocky discovered Ellen's feet, and the match was lit; the fire in him began, though his understanding of that fire was elementary still: heat, dizziness, a pulse hammering in his ears—he was not even sure it was his own. Back in Denver, he had only briefly seen Ellen, but now, in the long sunblasted days of what seemed like the other side of the world, he was getting to know her, or at least beginning to become attuned to her every move.

That day at Denny's, wayward and without cares and lugging big tote bags, they all ordered just what their hearts told them. Wade ordered a shrimp cocktail and a hot brownie sundae, which he intended to eat in reverse order. Ellen ordered the peach melba plate. Rocky opted for just an order of French fries, but when they finally arrived he found that he had no appetite. Food seemed boring, a waste of time when Ellen was sitting there in what smelled like a cloud of orange or sweet lemon.